No One Gives A Shit About That Climate Change Thing That's Going to Kill Us All

[Solid Snake]

So the entirety of Greenland's ice is melting away in an abnormally warm summer. An ice chunk twice the size of Manhattan has broken off.

There's compelling evidence that the power outages impacting half of India's population right now are at least in part due to the effects of climate change. In America, climate change has contributed to crippling droughts that likely will cost us over $450 million in damages from the wildfires in Colorado alone, as the drought made that situation far worse than it may have been otherwise.

Worse still, the media is completely failing in its duty to inform the public of how and why these disasters are happening. Despite efforts from scientists to show the correlation in detail, the presumably 'left-wing' media has steadfastly stonewalled reporting the news. When Bill Nye showed up to express disappointment in the media for its failure to confront President Obama or Mitt Romney on the issues, CNN -- not Fox News, CNN -- responded by derisively labeling him a 'kook' and giving excuses for its audience to disbelieve him.

It should be newsworthy that a Koch-funded scientist who once denied global warming even existed has now acknowledged its existence, but of course not. Let's just bury that headline and pretend it never happened.

As noted in this article:

In a recent speech on the Senate floor, Senator John Kerry characterized the political discourse in the United States as a “conspiracy of silence … a story of disgraceful denial, back-pedaling, and delay that has brought us perilously close to a climate change catastrophe.” This silence means that we can expect further delays in addressing climate change, delays that we cannot afford.

Of course, since only 74% of Democrats and less than half of Republicans in America even believe that climate change is a thing, because Flat Earth Societies are totally cool places to hang out and whatnot.

Still, I think the best recent development is George Will's accusation that climate change is totally a hoax and what's really going on right now is just "Summer." Uh-huh.

Or perhaps we should listen to the stellar advice of America's greatest lawyer and sterling citizen, Ann Coulter:

As Steven Guilbeault of Greenpeace explained, “global warming can mean colder, it can mean drier, it can mean wetter.” No set of facts can disprove the environmentalists’ secular religion. In 2004, former vice president Al Gore gave a speech on global warming in New York City on the coldest day of the year. Warm trends prove global warming. Cold trends also prove global warming. This is the philosophy of a madman.

When shit finally hits the fan, I sincerely hope Coulter is alive to witness it, and is among the first to suffer the consequences.

So, this is how the world is going to end: We're going to refuse to give a damn about the catastrophic consequences of our actions, then enjoy watching the ecosystem collapse around us, as documented in these documents and conceded by the EPA.

Right now, we're heading for the worst-case scenario forecast in those sets of predictions. The one piece of good news for atheists: In proving humanity to be terrible stewards of the planet, we will refute the central contention of Genesis, namely that humanity can handle said responsibilities. I'm not sure that will really matter, though, because we will all be dead; not just us, but our descendants, and their descendants, and the majority, if the not the entirety, of our species, as well as nearly every other species on this planet, with the possible exceptions of the likes of cockroaches.

And despite all of this, we care less now than we did mere years ago.
Good job reporting what's important, media!

I will probably eventually edit this post for the sake of my impending legal career, but for now I'll let this stand: If things don't seriously change for the better anytime soon, I will genuinely support, in spirit if not in reality, the efforts of any environmental group to engage in 'illegal' acts of civil disobedience to boost awareness among the public by any means necessary. The continued survival of humanity as a species is far too important to allow the powers that be to continue to get away with this.

[Ryong]

We've been having a lot of droughts and some pretty shitty summers here and it seems our government also doesn't give a damn about the climate change. Heck, it doesn't give a damn about education and basically every public university is on strike for a few weeks now.

I remember reading a while ago that what would be happening was more to the likes of more extreme climates, both very hot and very cold, but I'll have to check how right that is, so excuse me for a while. Also:

Originally Posted by Solid Snake

and the majority, if the not the entirety, of our species, as well as nearly every other species on this planet, with the possible exceptions of the likes of cockroaches.

Emphasis mine. Naw, I'm sure a fuckton of species will do just fine, but humanity is probably fucked.

[Solid Snake]

Originally Posted by Ryong

I remember reading a while ago that what would be happening was more to the likes of more extreme climates, both very hot and very cold, but I'll have to check how right that is, so excuse me for a while. Also:

That's true, but Ann Coulter said (as quoted above) that some climates cannot become hotter while other climates become colder, therefore we know that climate change is in fact a huge scam run by evil Environmentalists, because, y'know, Environmentalists totally control all the major corporations and have access to lots of money and power to influence politics and science.

[Sifright]

Originally Posted by Ryong

*snip*
Emphasis mine. Naw, I'm sure a fuckton of species will do just fine, but humanity is probably fucked.

I missed this post earlier, this is completely and utterly wrong. Animals unlike humanity are incapable of adapting their environment to their needs. When the environment changes their adaptation takes the form of genetic adaptation over tens of thousands of years. Nothing will be able to adapt to the sudden shift in climate that is coming, we will lose over 70% of all life on the planet by 2050 unless we make huge inroads into the co2 we are pumping out.


At the moment all we've done is decrease the rate at which our total co2 output is increasing

[Terex4]

[Aerozord]

Originally Posted by Terex4

that the thing that got me. Lets assume global warming is complete bull. So what? why would you be against reducing pollution. Even if CO2 isn't causing it, its still poisonous gas.

[Solid Snake]

Originally Posted by Aerozord

that the thing that got me. Lets assume global warming is complete bull. So what? why would you be against reducing pollution. Even if CO2 isn't causing it, its still poisonous gas.

The only thing I dislike about that argument is the fact that gives even a moment's worth of hypothetical consideration to the possibility that global warming is, in fact, a bullshit hoax.

[Aldurin]

Originally Posted by Solid Snake

The only thing I dislike about that argument is the fact that gives even a moment's worth of hypothetical consideration to the possibility that global warming is, in fact, a bullshit hoax.

Let me just start off by saying that I'm for more environmentally-friendly technology and practices (just not to massively politicize something by slapping "Green" on the title regardless of whether or not it actually helps), so that I my viewpoint isn't misunderstood.

The luxury of precise and worldwide climate data has not existed long enough to properly settle the dispute of whether this shift of climate is a recurring trend or a snowballing disaster caused by CO2 excess, and will require more time to settle.

Modern-day society is not environmentally-friendly, and that is something that should definitely be changed using our technology and resources. My disagreement with the environmentalist point of view is that it is 100% our fault that climate is changing, and also with the way that it sometimes gets overpoliticized.

[Amake]

Originally Posted by Aldurin

The luxury of precise and worldwide climate data has not existed long enough to properly settle the dispute of whether this shift of climate is a recurring trend or a snowballing disaster caused by CO2 excess, and will require more time to settle.

Well, we do know we're in a significantly more extreme warming period than anything that's happened since the Earth's biosphere gained its current form, and it started just around the time of the industrial revolution. Maybe it's a coincidence and we are making a finer world without really needing to, but I don't want to wait 50 000 years to find out just in case.

[Sifright]

Originally Posted by Aldurin

Let me just start off by saying that I'm for more environmentally-friendly technology and practices (just not to massively politicize something by slapping "Green" on the title regardless of whether or not it actually helps), so that I my viewpoint isn't misunderstood.

The luxury of precise and worldwide climate data has not existed long enough to properly settle the dispute of whether this shift of climate is a recurring trend or a snowballing disaster caused by CO2 excess, and will require more time to settle.

Modern-day society is not environmentally-friendly, and that is something that should definitely be changed using our technology and resources. My disagreement with the environmentalist point of view is that it is 100% our fault that climate is changing, and also with the way that it sometimes gets overpoliticized.

I'd just like to say this is actually mostly not true, There have studies done on the effects increasing CO2 would have on global climat since 1890. Smarty can probably help with this more but a fairly prominent physicist of the time said that a doubling of Co2 would cause temperature globally to increase by a certain amount and his predictions actually bare out in how temperatures have risen over the last 120 years.

We don't have time 'Let the science settle it' for several reasons firstly it's not true scientific consensus overwhelming supports the case that not only are we responsible for global warming but that in actual fact we are doing so at such an unprecdented rate we are destroying the planets buffers that would ordinary deal with one off spikes in CO2 or temperature due to other causes.

Secondly we simply don't have time the effects are already now being felt and they will only snowball from here we have been adding CO2 to the air since the beginnings of the industrial revolution.

Lastly It is entirely our fault, many people cannot concieve of how this is possible after all the earth is such an enormous place and each one of us is such a small and tiny speck compared to it. Well here is the thing, technology has allowed us to hit vastly above our weight. we burn through ninety million barrels of crude oil a day. To give you an idea of the volume of that this would take up a single barrel is 40 gallons of crude.

To put that in perspective we burn 5,454 Olympic sized swimming pools of crude oil per day or 1,990,909 in a year.

The amount of crude oil we use only goes up with time.

Originally Posted by Aerozord

this is something that occured to me

Its not disputing CO2 producing green house effect, just a thought that there might be another factor. Basically all the energy we use is ultimately transfered into heat. Computers, TVs, lights, engines (kinetic energy pales compared to energy to overcome friction) all becomes heat and we use something like 80% of what the earth receives from the sun per day.

Thats alot of extra heat

We already have precise data for total heat energy coming into the earth due to the sun, i'm unwilling to run the numbers but total energy output of humanity in terms of heat energy given via all technology since forever amounts to less than a months sunlight that hits the earth and more like less than a week.